Nancy Fraser

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Nancy Fraser (born 20 May 1947) is an American critical theorist, currently the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City. Fraser earned her PhD in philosophy from the CUNY Graduate Center and taught in the philosophy department at Northwestern University for many years before moving to the New School. In addition to her many publications and lectures, Fraser is a former Co-editor of Constellations, an international journal of critical and democratic theory, where she remains an active member of the Editorial Council.[2]

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Fraser is a noted feminist thinker concerned with conceptions of justice in the tradition of feminist thinkers like Martha Fineman. She argues that justice is a complex concept which must be understood from the standpoint of three separate yet interrelated dimensions: distribution (of resources), recognition (of the varying contributions of different groups), and representation (linguistic). She believes that as blank slate theory becomes increasingly marginalised by advances in genetics, Marxists should refocus their efforts on the espousal of blind redistribution over more equitable concepts of social justice such as those advocating the need for different groups to make concrete contributions to society.

In Fortunes of Feminism, 2013, Fraser regards Marxist theory as being concerned with distribution. In New Left Review, 86, March/April 2014, she rediscovers Marx’s definition of capital as a social relationship between those with means of production and those who can only gain access to means of production by selling their ability to work. But she does not incorporate production where different social relations prevail – in the household, the community, and the public sector – into the economy as a whole.

In keeping with her quest to avoid reductive conceptions of issues such as justice and democratic participation, she also argues that social theorists should synthesize elements of critical theory and post-structuralism, overcoming the "false antithesis" between the two,[3] in order to gain a fuller understanding of the social and political issues with which both approaches are concerned.

However, Fraser is not advocating a vague confusion of the two, but rather a pragmatic approach in which each school of thought is rigorously interrogated in order to separate its useful from its non-useful or detrimental elements for a democratic analysis of societal institutions and social movements. Thus Fraser is squarely in the tradition of left-democratic values while accommodating within this tradition the more recent insights of feminist theories, critical theory, and post-structuralism.

Fraser was also one of the first English-speaking philosophers to do important work on Foucault.

Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis is a collection of essays written from 1985 to 2010[4] that aims at dissecting the “drama in three acts” that according to the author is the thread of second-wave feminism.[5] Act one represents the moment when the feminist movement joined radical movements to transform society through uncovering gender injustice and capitalism’s androcentrism, while act two, Fraser highlights with regret, is a switch from redistribution to recognition and difference and a shift to identity politics that risk to support neoliberalism through efforts to build a free market society.[4][5] Foreseeing act three as a revival of the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis.[6] Feminism must be a force working in concert with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier waves of women’s liberation.[4][6]

The work is considered an important contribution as it provides a clear frame to rethink issues related to labour, emancipation, identity, rights claims at the core of political demands of justice in the contemporary context of neoliberism.[5] Although a necessary incorporation of political economy into contemporary feminist discourse,[7] Fraser’s use theoretical schemas has been criticized as dense and baffling at times—it is unclear, for example, why there are three types of needs discourses, four registers of dependency, or seven principles of gender justice. M. E. Mitchell, writer for Marx & Philosophy, writes “This [complexity] is, perhaps, owing to her propensity to avail herself of whatever terms best encapsulate processes of institutionalized oppression. Thinking thus, from the ground up, gives her work a complexity that at times compromises the systematic quality and coherence of her theoretical categories.”[8]

Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory is a collection of essays written between 1980 and 1989.[9] The book examines the theories of power and source in Foucault, the politics of French deconstruction and Richard Rorty, the politics of gender in Habermas, and the politics of need interpretation in two concluding essays which delineate her own position within contemporary socialist-feminist critical theory.[10] Contemporaries such as Douglas Kellner have praised Fraser’s writings as “seasoned with social hope”[10] and effectively synthesizing feminist commitment to political agency and social progress with several forms of modern and postmodern social scepticism; however, her goals of providing “the sort of big diagnostic picture necessary to orient [the current] political practice” of socialist feminism[9] have been criticized for being too ambitious and ultimately narrow in their execution. Patricia S. Mann summarizes the pitfalls of the text:

I wish Fraser had made more of an effort to call upon the resources of analytic philosophy. It is true that analytic philosophers look all the way back to Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham for their paradigms of analytic philosophy. Unfazed because untouched by these notions of social constitution of individuals, or by the irrationalities of individual thought, philosophy offers an outmoded yet still seaworthy vessel for any seeking to ride out the storms of postmodern disillusionment with notions of agency and process. Had Fraser utilized the works of analytic political thinkers when she finally came to formulate her socialist-feminist theory of the welfare state she could have exploited the admittedly “thin” theories of political agency and political rights within political philosophy today.[11]